July 02, 2009

3 Words That Should Scare Every Client

If John Wanamaker were alive today, he might re-state his famous maxim:

"I know half of what my agency tells me is bullshit, I just don't know which half."

If you're feeling that way, here's a tip.

Anytime someone at the agency starts a presentation with the words "Consumers told us..."that's a good time to get out the boots and shovels.

You see, the key to success in the ad business for the past 15 years or so, has been to deny you have any personal thoughts or ideas and to pretend that everything you are doing is the result of a slavish adherence to the desires of "the consumer."

Next time you hear "consumers told us..." here are a few questions to ask:

How many consumers told us this?

How many consumers told us something else?

Under what circumstances did these consumers tell us this stuff?

Are you using their words or your interpretation?

Did these consumers stop us on the street and tell us this, or were they in some artificial environment?

If it was an artificial environment, what was the stimulus that caused them to tell us this?

The reason you need to ask these questions is that we advertising people are a fortunate lot. Consumers have an amazing tendency to tell us exactly what we want to hear.

"Shakespeare was a storyteller. You're a copywriter.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans.""As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business requires sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."